Since I recently upgraded a bunch of WordPress blogs, the little SimpleCAPTCHA plugin stopped working. Oh, it displayed alright, but no matter what characters were typed into the captcha box, the comment would go through. And so, the comment spam increased and, even though we have comment moderation turned on, it was annoying to see piles of nonsense in my spam queue.

Earlier on, I'd been using various techniques to block comment spam, but they were a hassle and needed to be updated fairly often. Then I installed a captcha. I'd of course heard that spammers can get around captchas, and maybe they can, but my experience since first installing captchas has been that it pretty much stops the spam cold. Whereas I'd get dozens of spam blog comments a day (remember, I've worked to block them), after installing the captchas, I got one or two a month. more »

So I woke up today to find that my computer system was not recognizing my second monitor. A little testing revealed that the nVidia control panel (for my graphics card) would not start up; in fact, it was missing from the Windows (XP) system tray, and would not start from the Windows control panel. And, in fact, the Windows control panel display panel was not displaying the second monitor either. more »

A truly search engine friendly shopping cart

I've been promising a Sunshop shopping cart review, particularly since Turnkey Web Tools' php-based Sunshop 4 is a huge enhancement over the earlier excellent versions, and lots of additional little tweaks have been added since the initial release (we've up to version 4.1.5). Let me put it this way — I've just completed two (of three) ecommerce sites utilizing Sunshop 4, and am about to launch into a fourth. While I'm great at kvetching, you'll hear no complaints from me. more »

WordPress 2.6 has been released, and it has useful new features. Watch the video below or watch the larger version at the WordPress blog:

One thing: the Press It feature allows you to add a button to your browser toolbar and then, as you surf the web and feel like blogging, just click the button to have your WP window pop up … then start blogging. It'll also allow you to quote sections of text — and use images from the webpage you're visiting. All but the last sound good to me. In the past, bloggers had to jump through a couple of hoops, albeit elementary, in order to snatch images from websites. Now WordPress helps them do it. <sigh>

That said, given the, uh, ongoing nature of my web surfing, and the fact that I've got four blogs now, I think I'll keep an eye on the WordPress forums for any gotcha's. And then I'm going to upgrade.

One of the beauties of Opera is it's Speed Dial feature … a "page" containing nine slots in which you can specify websites to open at the click of the mouse. The problem, though, is that this feature (which I initially thought was silly, but grew to love) gets full pretty quickly, so nine slots does not quite do it. Especially if you have a large monitor. more »

The Start > Documents menu in Windows lists the documents (files) you've most recently accessed. According to Annoyances.org's instructions for turning off the Document menu: more »